Saturday, October 18, 2008

Does The Storminess Record of the Armagh Observatory Show A Correlation Between Gales And Global Temperature?

No.

The Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland has monitored and recorded the number of storms with gale winds since 1796, with a short period in the early 1800s (1825 to 1833) during which data is not available or incomplete. The record is available here:http://climate.arm.ac.uk/publications/The_Storminess_Record_from_Armagh_Observatory_Dr4.pdfAppendix 4 starts on page 80 and lists the “Seasonal Distribution of Gales from Weather Diary at Armagh Observatory 1796-2000”. The following four graphs illustrate the seasonal gales per year from 1796 to 2000. All four graphs show an increase in storms from the early 20th Century to the mid to late 20th Century. But then the frequency of gales decreases as global temperatures continues to rise.

The seasonal data is totaled in the next graph, which shows the annual gales from 1796 to 2000. The two anomalous peak years are 1950 and 1982. The trough between them bottoms out in the early 1970s. I’ve also smoothed the data with a 10-year running-average filter, in case the underlying trend wasn’t apparent to some.http://i36.tinypic.com/2me71cg.jpgAnnual Gales

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